I would not have guessed ...

... that a guy who sang the 'Silent E' song on The Electric Company would have such a storied life -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer

"The record deal with Reprise Records for the That Was The Year That Was album also gave Reprise distribution rights for his earlier recordings, as Lehrer wanted to wind up his own record imprint. The Reprise issue of Songs by Tom Lehrer was a stereo re-recording. This version was not issued on CD, but the songs were issued on the live Tom Lehrer Revisited CD. The [live] recording included bonus tracks "L-Y" and "Silent E", two of the ten songs that Lehrer wrote for the PBS children's educational series The Electric Company. Lehrer later commented that worldwide sales of the recordings under Reprise surpassed 1.8 million units in 1996. That same year, the album That Was The Year That Was went gold.^[18] The album liner notes (and Lehrer himself in one routine) promote his songs using reverse psychology, by quoting negative reviews. ("I know it's very bad form to quote one's own reviews, but there is something the New York Times said about me [in 1958], that I have always treasured: 'Mr. Lehrer's muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.")"

A cost-effective way to protect the health of children?

Ban smoking.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/smoking-bans-tied-to-reduced-childhood-asthma-1.2590734
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60082-9/fulltext

"Pooled estimates suggest that rates of both preterm birth and pediatric hospital admissions for asthma were reduced by 10 per cent," after smoke-free legislation was introduced, Aziz Sheikh, the study’s senior author and a physician-researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and his Dutch and Belgian co-authors concluded.

Wow these charts really make me wanna cry.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2014/03/piketty-looks-at-inequality-in-six-charts.html



















 This last one is I think the most terrifying because of what future it predicts, based on past empirical data -

(Note: Chart source: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-first Century.”)

Something new I learned today.

More whips kill the horse, not make it gallop faster.

More than half of Americans are poor or in poverty.

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/more-evidence-that-half-of-america-is-in-or-near-poverty


2. and 5. are easily me.

Quote of the day - 03-23-2014.

 William Frank -

 “Great. Now I’ll be up all night thinking about this.”

Wonder what this means for the Internet?

The United States announces that it will relinquish control of the DNS root zone, removing its oversight of ICANN.